Truth and Reconciliation
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Throughout his œuvre, the two classes of people who seem to have the greatest difficulty connecting are mothers and their gay sons. In And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), McNally’s first professionally produced play, the tyrannical Ruby mocks her son Sigfrid for bringing home a male sexual partner for that evening’s game of “Get the Guest” and for writing a poem about an eagle’s desire to break free of earthly bonds and soar. Similarly, in A Perfect Ganesh, Katharine Brynne is inconsolable after her son Walter is beaten to death on the street late one night by five African-American males trawling a gay neighborhood for fags to bash. Yet while he was alive, she had resented deeply Walter’s orientation and had objected to his referring to the apartment that he shared with his male partner as a “home.” Traveling in India, she meets an HIV-positive gay man who ruefully acknowledges having been similarly rejected by his own mother.

In Corpus Christi (1998), Mary is indifferent to the trials of Joshua, her gay teenage son, and proves to be anything but the archetypal loving mother who holds her infant son on her knee or sorrowfully gathers to her bosom his adult corpse. Even Chloe in Lips Together, who gets along famously with the gay men with whom she performs in community theater, admits that she would never want one of her pre-pubescent sons to turn out gay. The one thing that all children want to hear, Chloe instructs her childless sister-in-law, is “that they’re loved. That they’re safe.” But in McNally’s world, this is the one message that a mother seems to find impossible to deliver to her gay son.

In 1988, Andre’s Mother bore witness to a significant moment in American social history as the country reeled with pain and confusion at the height of the AIDS pandemic. First presented on stage at the Manhattan Theatre Club as an eight-minute vignette that was part of an evening of short plays titled Urban Blight, Andre’s Mother was expanded by McNally into a fifty-minute Emmy Award-winning teleplay that first aired in 1990 as part of PBS’s American Playhouse. It starred Richard Thomas as the all too eager-to-please Cal, and the magisterial Sada Thompson in the title role, on whose silent face played her character’s tumultuous interior drama as stoical confusion mingled with angry resentment and dissolved into unspeakable grief. Although the play clearly faults Andre’s Mother (she has no other name in the original text) for having been so judgmental of Andre’s sexuality that she lost her chance to have a genuine relationship with him while he was alive, the teleplay resonated for female viewers whose sons were ill or had died of AIDS. The McNally Archive in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, preserves a file of letters that McNally received during the months following the initial broadcast in which women thanked him for voicing so eloquently the pain of mothers who had no idea how to talk with their sons about the latter’s sexuality, or how to care for them in their final illness. The letter-writers often signed themselves simply “Peter’s Mother” or “Michael’s Mother.”

McNally’s latest play, Mothers and Sons, is essentially a continuation of the 1988 AIDS drama only twenty years later. Cal Porter receives an unexpected visit from Katharine Gerard (Andre’s Mother now has a name), last seen at the memorial service that Andre’s friends were holding for him in Central Park. Then he’d struggled to break through Mrs. Gerard’s angry and disapproving silence, eventually leaving her alone to grieve. At the climax of Mothers and Sons—which enjoyed a trial run this summer at Bucks County Playhouse and begins previews on Broadway at the Golden Theatre as of February 23—Cal finally loses his self-control in the face of Mrs. Gerard’s stony façade, telling her: “You should have held me that day in the park [when I embraced you as I said goodbye]. … I wanted you to hold me back. Jesus Christ, woman, reach out to someone. Let someone in.” Exasperated by her seemingly inexhaustible fund of hauteur and bitterness, Cal accepts that they will never share common ground and finally begins ushering her out of his apartment by helping her into her coat. But, the stage directions record, “her arms stay at her side. Awkwardly, her coat over her shoulders, he hugs her. He holds her for a long while. Her arms finally reach out to embrace him back.”

Andre’s Mother was written at the darkest moment in the AIDS epidemic as the death count climbed precipitously, public dialogue grew cacophonous, and no hope lay on the horizon. In Mothers and Sons, McNally alters the chronology slightly by moving Andre’s death from 1988 to 1993—just a few years before protease inhibitors made HIV a manageable condition and AIDS began to disappear from American public discourse. Otherwise, his characters seem to have aged naturally: Katharine is still a handsome woman in her mid-sixties. Cal—who has been living for twelve years with his 35-year-old partner, Will Ogden, with whom he’s raising a six-year-old son, Bud—is approaching fifty. To drive his new plot, however, McNally has imagined an action not dramatized in the earlier play. Some time after the memorial service, Cal mailed to Mrs. Gerard her son’s diary in order that she might know the man that Andre had become after leaving his parents’ home in Dallas and moving to New York City some ten years before he died. Now, twenty years later, herself a widow, she has come to Cal and Will’s condominium on Central Park West to return the diary (still unread, she claims).

Mothers and Sons describes the sea-change in American gay life from 1993 to 2013. The socially conservative Mrs. Girard is taken aback to learn that Cal and Will are legally married, a state that Cal somewhat sarcastically contrasts with the more open sexual relationship that he and Andre enjoyed in the 1980s: “Of course we’d never taken marriages vows. We weren’t allowed to then. Our relationships weren’t supposed to last. We didn’t deserve the dignity of marriage. Maybe that’s why AIDS happened.” The fifteen year age difference between Cal and Will—the latter having come of age after the threat was largely under control—guarantees a conflict in expectations and values within their marriage. For example, Cal confides to Katharine that being a father comes more naturally to Will: “I think it’s generational. I never expected to be a father. He never expected not to be one.” And whereas Cal still struggles to find the right word to describe their relationship—“Andre and I were boyfriends, I guess. Or partners. Lovers was another word people used. We didn’t like any of them. Boyfriends sounded like teenagers, partners sounded like a law firm and lovers sounded illicit”—Will confidently stares down Mrs. Gerard’s contumely by identifying himself as “Cal’s first husband.”

Perhaps most troubling to Katharine is the new sort of family that she witnesses in the Ogden-Porter household. Cal and Will conceived their six-year-old son Bud by mixing Will’s sperm with a female donor’s eggs, which were then implanted in the womb of an obliging lesbian friend. “What are you going to tell him” about his parentage when Bud is old enough to understand, Mrs. Gerard asks pointedly. But Bud himself indirectly answers her question when, innocently prattling, he asks her if she would be his grandmother, as both Cal’s and Will’s mothers are deceased. Objecting that he doesn’t know her well enough to consider her a close relation, she’s taken aback when Bud reasons that he meets “lots of aunts and uncles and godfathers and godmothers” whom he didn’t know he had, some of whom “I don’t even like.” The boy happily accepts that “families just grow.” For McNally, family is not a concrete, indissoluble entity but a living organism that shifts shape to meet our needs: we choose our family members as much as we inherit them or have them thrust upon us.

Indeed, choice and change prove the twin poles of McNally’s play. Cal acknowledges to Katharine that he “almost bolted” when Will first made it clear that he wanted to have children, but eventually complied with his younger partner’s demand because “I was afraid he’d leave me.” His willingness to accept Will’s very different idea of what a gay relationship can be has had a radical consequence for Cal. “Now, to imagine my life without either of them … I didn’t know who I fully was until our son was born. I’m so much … more than I thought I was. More interesting, more resourceful, more less-self-centered.” Ultimately, he says, he and Will “chose to be a family.” Conversely, Katharine recognizes that “people have to want to change” and that she has not wanted to. Instead, during the past twenty years her life has diminished into a bitter, angry desire to wreak revenge on those who took her son from her. Referring to the framed theater poster of Andre starring as Hamlet that Cal has hanging on the wall, she spits out: “There is no closure for what happened to me. I want revenge. I’m like Hamlet. Take my picture. I’m my own poster. Vengeance!”

The Music of Forgiveness

In McNally’s Golden Age (2012), when asked what I Puritani was about, composer Vincenzo Bellini said that his opera contained the music of forgiveness. That same music continues to play in Mothers and Sons. Challenged by the vengeful Katharine as to why he didn’t want to learn who had infected his beloved Andre with HIV in order to seek revenge on that person, Cal quietly explains:

We were in enough pain without adding to it. Something was killing us. What would killing one another have accomplished? There was so much fear and anger in the face of so much death and no one to help us. There wasn’t time to hate, so we helped each other, helped each other in a way we never had before. I wanted to kill the world when Andre was diagnosed, but I didn’t. I took care of him. Andre had slept with someone other than me but I had to forgive him. He was one of the unlucky ones.

Over the years, Cal’s pain has been intensified by the knowledge that if Andre had been infected just two years later, he might still be alive. “One of our best friends was diagnosed eighteen years ago, two years after Andre died. He’s skiing in Park City as we speak.” But he understands that there is no logical reason why one person was infected and another was not, or why one individual had to die before help finally arrived while another had the good fortune to fall ill only after the discovery of the “triple cocktail.” Rather than lamenting that one’s life did not turn out differently, as Katharine does, Cal accepted the need to act with the love, valor, and compassion celebrated in the title of McNally’s most famous play, and to care for Andre, the man he loved deeply, in the latter’s decline.

When Will returns on stage from giving Bud his evening bath, he finds Cal and Katharine standing at opposite ends of the room, like boxers in opposite corners of the ring. To break the tension, Will picks up Andre’s diary—which has sat on the mantelpiece like a silent recrimination to both Katharine and Cal—and begins reading at random: “One day we’re certain we’re going to beat this thing. The next, I’m dying. Cal is a rock. I am blessed. My family wouldn’t be able to handle it.” Katharine is shaken to hear Andre’s testimony concerning the love and dedication with which Cal nursed him during his painful decline—qualities that Andre understood his own mother would not have been able to muster. Devastated by her son’s recrimination as from the grave, she moves mechanically to leave. But in an exquisite gesture of compassion and forgiveness, Cal, choosing not to let her feel dwarfed and alone, makes one final attempt to realize his “hope for that connection” by embracing her. And, unlike that cold winter day in the park twenty years ago, this time Katharine chooses to let someone in.

Post-AIDS Gay Culture

McNally’s revival of characters that he had created at the height of the epidemic highlights his unusual place in AIDS and post-AIDS gay culture. The impact of the epidemic on American culture has been felt in four stages.

At the outset, books like David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed and John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket depicted a community reeling with confusion as the tidal wave hit. The soon-to-follow second stage offered howls of pained, angry protest as the dimensions of the epidemic—and the indifference or outright animosity of those in power—became clear, as evinced in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, Paul Monette’s Love Alone, and the two parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The third stage witnessed an acknowledgment of AIDS as an inescapable reality as the community organized to find ways to care for the infected and to live with the love, valor, and compassion celebrated in McNally’s play. The availability of protease inhibitors after 1996, however, created a new sea change and a “post-AIDS” culture, as writers pondered how to represent the disease now that it was no longer an emergency of the first order even though its shadow continued to cast a pall over gay life. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a signal work in that AIDS is not at the center of the drama but functions as one of several overwhelming challenges to the characters’ psychic survival.

McNally has generally been grouped in the third stage of writers. His works in the 90s were not aggressively political but were concerned more generally with how people lose their humanity when unable to accept gender and racial differences. But at heart McNally has always been a post-AIDS writer, able to look at AIDS in the larger context of the wounds that people inflict on one another. When Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune premiered, few people thought of it as a gay play or an AIDS play. Yet as one of the heterosexual characters sucked blood from the cut finger of the other—soon after the world had learned that HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids—a collective gasp was sounded by the audience, endowing Johnny’s plea that “we gotta connect … or we die” with great resonance. For McNally, it is fear of connection with others, not sexual connection itself, that is deadening. In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, two married heterosexual couples spend three acts rationalizing their decision to refrain from using a swimming pool in which the brother of a relative, now dead, once swam.

Mothers and Sons looks back without flinching at the nightmare in which we floundered twenty years ago: “Andre thought of suicide when things got really bad. I’m very glad he didn’t. I know that was selfish of me. We stuck it out together. Some together! They put him through hell trying to keep him alive. Some of the treatments were very painful then. You don’t want to know. They were trying to find a cure and they didn’t care how they went about it. That’s not fair; they were desperate to find one.”

The details of the play, such as the repeated references to the darkness and coldness of the day, suggest that Cal’s encounter with Katharine will once again end in tragedy. Yet Cal’s capacity for forgiveness, coupled with his determination to achieve “the miracle of communication” with Katharine, allows an incipient tragedy to be transformed into a transcendent ending in which a reconstituted family sits before the fireplace as Bud tells Katharine a winter’s tale that ends in renewal. “I wasn’t expecting this,” Cal protests at one point as he skirmishes with Katharine; “this was going to be just another day.”

At one point in Love! Valour! Compassion! two of the eight men at a weekend house party are taken aback by the deathly quiet of the summer afternoon. “We could be the last eight people on earth,” Perry observes. “That’s a frightening thought,” Buzz replies. “Not if you’re with the right people,” Perry counters. As the December darkness presses against the windows of their apartment, Cal, Will, Bud, and Katharine might themselves be the last four people on earth. But that’s all right because they’ve clearly chosen to create a family made of the right four people.